1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a hard disk drive (HDD), and in particular to a HDD equipped with a FAT memory for storing FAT information.
2. Background of the Related Art
FIG. 1 shows a conventional HDD and computer peripheries, which includes at least one hard disk 11, which includes materials for enabling data storage, having sectors SEC0 through SEC47 divided by a sector separation line SEC and a track TRA, a head 12 for reading data from and writing data on the hard disk 11, a controller 13 for controlling the operation of the head 12 and the rotation of the hard disk 11 and the data input/output, and a buffer 14 for buffering the data outputted from the controller 13 and the data bus BUS.
A ROM 16 stores disk drive information provided by the manufacturer. The disk drive information, as is known to one of ordinary skill in the art, generally consist of number of cylinders, heads and sector per track of the hard disk 11. Such information is needed since hard disk drive format varies for each manufacturer and/or HDD model. Further, the disk drive information can be stored in the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) ROM of a computer, as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,018,095, 5,247,633 and 5,327,549 to Nissimov, whose disclosure is incorporated herein by reference.
As shown in FIG. 2, the sectors SEC0 through SEC47 includes a boot region BOOT for storing a bit record, a file allocation table (FAT) region FATS for storing information related to the location of files, a root director region RD for storing file size, file-made date and time, the address of a start cluster, and a data region DATA for storing contents of file.
Such HDD organization and concepts are known to one of ordinary skill in the art, and are explained in PETER NORTON'S INSIDE THE PC, Premier Edition, pages 166-169 and pages 203-204 and INSIDE THE PC, 5th Edition, pages 180-207, both authored by Peter Norton. In a recent republication of INSIDE THE PC, 7th Edition, 1997, pages 200-223 by Peter Norton, whose disclosure is incorporated herein by reference, the HDD organization can be based on "zones" using Logical Block Addressing (LBA) for accomplishing the same number of sectors (see page 207, Technical Note). Further, U.S. Pat. No. 5,561,566 to Kigami et al., issued Oct. 1, 1996, which is incorporated herein by reference, discloses the use of the zones. Kigami et al. discloses a ROM 32 to store the zone tables. As can be appreciated by one of ordinary skill in the art, the zone table stored in ROM 32 can vary by each manufacturer and/or HDD model. Accordingly, the zone tables and/or number of cylinders and/or head, which comprise the disk drive information, are stored in the ROM 16 of FIG. 1 if the HDD of FIG. 1 utilized zones instead of sectors. In every publication by Peter Norton, the FAT region is stored in the sectors.
The operation of the conventional HDD will now be explained with reference to the accompanying drawings.
To begin with, the controller 13 controls the writing and reading operation of the HDD 11 and the movement of the head 12, so that data stored in the hard disk 11 is read, and data is written in the hard disk 11.
That is, the above-mentioned data input/output operation is performed in accordance with the following processes:
1) The controller 13 scans the address of the start cluster from the root directory region RD by controlling the head 12 and recognizes the location of the start cluster;
2) The controller 13 scans the address of the entire cluster by moving the head 12 to the FAT region FATS; and
3) The controller 13 reads and writes the data by moving the head 12 to the data region DATA.
Here, when a desired data is not recorded in one sector, that is, the desired data is stored in a plurality of sectors, the data is increased up to 4 times.
However, since the conventional HDD is directed to scanning the FAT information recorded on the FAT region of the HDD in every time of access of the HDD while the FAT region is located at the edge portion of the HDD, an additional access step is necessary, thus increasing the access time of the HDD.